


Vulpes Vulpes Fulvus

by scorpia



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Derek, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Frontotemporal Dementia, M/M, Minor Character(s), Miscommunication, Misunderstandings, Slow Burn, This story will mostly be just Derek and Stiles, full shift derek, no nogitsune
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:35:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27813898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpia/pseuds/scorpia
Summary: It was because Stiles was human, he told himself. It was because Stiles was fragile and could break much more easily than most people Derek had known throughout his life. Something about his entirely human scent always brought out Derek’s protective side. But he was Stiles’ alpha, Derek reasoned, it was normal for him to feel protective.Totally normal.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 2
Kudos: 31





	Vulpes Vulpes Fulvus

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Thanks so much for your interest in my story!
> 
> *This Work Has Been Fully Written* 
> 
> I will be posting the chapters as I finish editing them. As this is the case, the rating and tags may change over the course of the story, so please watch out for that!
> 
> Never fear, this will not be a discontinued story! :)
> 
> Enjoy!

Pack meant everything to a werewolf. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was more important than making sure that the pack stayed together, stayed strong, and stayed safe. So, when one member of the pack was sick, the entire pack was affected on a deep level.

The same rang true for every pack member, be it Alpha, Beta, or Omega. Or, in this case, a human. A tall, skinny, powerless human who had enough guts to hang around every supernatural creature he could find and become part of their life. A tall, skinny, powerless human named Stiles.

Since the beginning it was clear that Scott and Stiles were a package deal: signed, sealed, and delivered for all intents and purposes. Derek knew that he was going to get saddled with Stiles even before he became alpha. Hell, he knew it even before he knew that Scott would accept him as a mentor. And – because he knew how pack dynamics worked – he knew that eventually he would grow to care for the smart-ass kid with the honey colored eyes just as much as he would an actual werewolf.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Stiles became everyone’s favorite, as a collective whole, that was. Everyone in the pack had that one person they cared for most – like Boyd and Erica who were attached at the hip – but no one could deny, try as Jackson might, that the one they all admired most was Stiles.

He was human, and yet was constantly throwing himself in harm’s way to help out those who were bigger, stronger, and could heal faster than him. Lydia had her weird banshee magic – even if the rules of her powers were a bit blurry – and Allison was all but a ninja, so they had their advantages. But, as Stiles once said, sarcasm was his only defense.

More than the battle-field mentality, though, he was also the first to volunteer if anyone in the pack needed something. From caffeine-charged, all-night study sessions the day before an exam, to haphazardly making something semi-edible for dinner when no one had enough money to order food, Stiles was always there.

That was why this hit everyone so hard.

It quickly became pack knowledge when Stiles started getting weird dreams, he told Scott and, like the naive puppy he is, Scott told everyone else. But dreams are just dreams. No one took it too seriously when Stiles started sleepwalking, not even when he’d fallen asleep in history class and unconsciously trudged his way through the hall and straight into some lockers. In fact, everyone had thought it was kind of funny at the time.

No, the worrying didn’t start until one night Stiles had fallen asleep in the pack house, Derek’s rebuilt family home, and woke everyone up at near three in the morning shrieking like someone had cut off one of his limbs. All the wolves that lived in the house – Isaac, Boyd, and Erica – were downstairs in a matter of seconds, all of them wolfed out and ready for a fight. Derek, however, had shifted forms completely, sprinting into the room on all fours and snarling viciously before he had even recovered from the daze of his sleep.

When he saw what was before him, his snarls stopped and he turned to look at his betas, confirming that all of them were as equally confused as he was. Where he expected to find a room full of dangerous enemies, there Stiles was, completely alone and unharmed. He was still asleep on the couch, crying and thrashing and screaming out in fear.

Derek moved away for a moment to shift back into his human form. Since learning how to make the full transformation, he hadn’t used that talent unless of dire emergency, and he hadn’t meant to use it now, but apparently his instincts felt as though this qualified as an emergency without consulting him on it first.

Isaac shook Stiles awake before anyone could stop him, but Stiles’ distress didn’t go away just because he was conscious. He flailed, smacking Isaac’s hand away and looking at them in fear and confusion, disoriented and trembling. They tried asking him questions but it took him several minutes before he was able to answer any of them. It was then that they all knew that this went further than they had originally thought.

The next morning at breakfast, Derek wouldn’t let the subject drop until Stiles had explained to them that these night terrors had been going on for a few weeks. Every night.

“Why wouldn’t you have told us this?” Derek demanded, conflicted between his sudden worry for Stiles’ well-being and his anger at not having known before.

“I was hoping it would pass,” Stiles shrugged it off as casually as he could, eyes cast downward and busying himself by taking a drink of his orange juice. “I’ve had them before, they’ve gone away before. No big deal.”

Derek chose not to call Stiles out on the uptick in his heartbeat. Needless to say, however, he wasn’t convinced.

After that, he forced himself to have an awkward talk with the Sheriff – having made their begrudging peace with one another a while back. It took a few minutes for the conversation to not be stilted, and the both of them heaved a sigh or two, but in the end, they came to an agreement: the Sheriff would keep Derek informed of how his son’s mentality was progressing as long as Derek would limit the amount of stress on Stiles within the pack. Seemed easy enough, Derek could do that. It was what he couldn’t do that worried him more.

About a week later, the Incident occurred. Stiles called Scott in the middle of the night to tell him he was injured, cold, unsure of where he was, and positive that he wasn’t alone.

The pack, the entirety of the Sheriff’s Department, and several family friends exhausted themselves searching for Stiles that night. Derek couldn’t remember when he last depended on his sense of smell so much, running back and forth from one side of the town to the other, urgently trying to catch a trace of where Stiles could have gone. Stiles had such a unique scent, so it shouldn’t be this hard to find him. Why was Derek having such a hard time finding him?

He had a pit in his stomach thinking about how they might be too late, that something had already happened, that whoever had taken Stiles had done something to him. No one was allowed to touch any member of his pack, especially not the human who could so easily be hurt. The thought made him angry, but if he was angry then he couldn’t focus properly, and he needed to or else he’d never find Stiles.

It didn’t help that Stiles’ phone was dead, and the last Scott had heard from him he said that Stiles sounded absolutely terrified.

“Could you hear anything _at all_ in the background of the call?” Derek pushed impatiently.

“No, all I could hear was him breathing.” Scott reiterated, having answered several variations of this question already. He heaved an agitated sigh when Derek gave him a frustrated look. “My mind didn’t jump into detective mode when my best friend woke me up to say he was in trouble, okay? It jumped into panic mode.”

Derek supposed he couldn’t blame him for that, not when he was feeling the pit in his own stomach grow larger by the hour.

Stiles was finally found in the woods close to four in the morning, having been sleepwalking the whole time and thinking that everything he was dreaming was actually happening to him.

The relief Derek experienced when Allison called him to say that Stiles was located and taken to the hospital was like a submarine coming back up to the surface. After everything they’d all been through, Derek was just glad that Stiles was found  _ and _ that he hadn’t been outside long enough to catch hypothermia.

Once the emergency faded away, however, he couldn’t help the twinge he felt that it had been Scott and not  _ him _ Stiles had called for help. Why he felt that way he couldn’t be sure. Stiles and Scott were practically a pack of two before they joined with Derek, so could his alpha side be feeling challenged? It didn’t matter. All that really mattered was that Stiles had called  _ somebody _ . Besides, Scott and Stiles, they’re like brothers, Derek reminded himself. It’s only natural Stiles would call out for his brother when he needed someone.

This Incident was where the Sheriff drew the line in the sand, however. As promised, he pulled Derek aside to explain a few things, his heart rate slightly elevated but overall steady. Derek could tell that this conversation would have been much more awkward than their last, had it not been for the Sheriff keeping strictly to the facts, speaking only in short statements as if this were a casefile at work and not his son's health. Derek got the gist of it: Stiles’ symptoms were worryingly similar to those of his late wife’s. 

Frontotemporal Dementia. FTD. The only form of dementia known that can affect teenagers. The Sheriff asked for the doctors to give Stiles an MRI, and even though the official results could take about a week to confirm, they should have a good idea of what was happening by the end of the day.

Derek stared at the man blankly while he divulged this information. He had figured it was a sleep disorder of some kind, at worst a curse, so he hadn’t been expecting any of what the Sheriff was saying to him. He knew about Claudia Stilinski’s illness, but he hadn’t even considered that was what could be happening. 

An actual, inherited medical problem? The thought settled uneasily in his stomach, making him feel nauseous, but he couldn’t get worked up. Nothing was certain yet.

The entire pack crowded into Stiles’ hospital room to give him encouragement.

“Don’t be such a wuss, Stilinski, you’ll be fine,” Jackson rolled his eyes.

Lydia stepped on his foot as punishment, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. His voice lacked the usual edge it had when he was irritated and he couldn’t seem to look at Stiles’ face when he said it.

“We’ll take this one step at a time,” Lydia nodded at him, giving him a small but reassuring smile and squeezing his shoulder.

“Yeah, after what we deal with on a daily basis, there’s nothing we couldn’t handle,” Allison agreed.

“And now you can tell chicks that you’ve gotten your head scanned. They’d probably find that hot, right?” Isaac added with a raise of his eyebrows and a smirk. That he seemed to truly believe in what he just said got a chuckle out of everyone, at least.

Boyd just nodded at him with a small smile when their eyes met. Erica blinked her misting eyes a few times and gave Stiles a kiss on the top of his head before rubbing it away with a noogie despite Stiles’ protests, telling him that she wasn’t worried.

“You’ll be okay. Batman always is,” she said.

“Gee, thanks, guys.” Stiles grinned to no one in particular, patting his hair in an attempt to fix it. “Consider me tickled pink, really.”

The betas left after that, save for Scott, of course, who would be accompanying his mother and Stiles’ father in the MRI observation room. Derek took this moment when it was just the three of them to let go of some of his alpha persona and just be Derek. He could never really pull off “Alpha” with these two, anyway: they didn’t take him seriously enough.

He felt like he should have some words of wisdom to offer up, but he didn’t. Better than the rest of the pack, he knew that life sometimes dealt a shit hand to those who didn’t deserve it. So, no matter how much he wanted to tell Stiles not to worry, he couldn’t.

Instead, he did something that – despite the two of them being on much better terms than they were when they first met – he had never done before. He stepped into Stiles’ space and wrapped him up in a hug. Like he would have done with the rest of the pack, and much to Derek’s surprise, Stiles didn’t hesitate to return it.

“We’ll all be right outside waiting for you,” Derek said, still holding on to Stiles.

Stiles simply nodded and cleared his throat. “I’ll try not to keep you waiting too long. We all know how grumpy you are when you get impatient, big guy,” he teased with a confidence Derek could tell he didn’t feel, his hand moving up to pat Derek’s shoulder.

It was then that the nurse came in to take Stiles away, and Derek had to fight the urge to growl at her. His muscles tightened for a brief moment and for the life of him he couldn’t think of a time when he’d ever been so reluctant to let go of someone. Not that he was big on hugging people in the first place.

It was because Stiles was human, he told himself. It was because Stiles was fragile and could break much more easily than most people Derek had known throughout his life. Something about his entirely human scent always brought out Derek’s protective side. But he was Stiles’ alpha, Derek reasoned, it was normal for him to feel protective. Totally normal.

He stood with his pack in the hallway, watching as Stiles was rolled away in a wheelchair and through some double doors with Scott.

Two hours later, Scott came back out into the waiting area, eyes glassy and red-rimmed. The pack stood to greet him, but the moment they saw Scott’s face, they all had their respective reactions. 

Allison ran over to Scott and hugged him tight, letting him sob into her shoulder. Lydia covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head in disbelief. Jackson and Boyd stayed silent but their eyes fell to the floor. Erica kicked the chair she had been sitting in, thankfully containing her true strength, before burying her face into Boyd’s chest. Isaac sank back down into his own chair, looking truly lost for the first time since he was falsely arrested for his father’s murder.

Derek just stood there, not even caring for once that he wasn’t sure how to properly comfort the rest of his pack. His face was blank but his stomach was twisting, his mind couldn’t comprehend what he knew all of this meant. He didn’t  _ want _ to comprehend it. So he just stood there, staring at Scott who was crying his eyes out, and wished that fate really wasn’t this cruel.

This was how it was going to be then. Stiles was going to die the same way that his mother had years before, from an illness that would slowly but surely tear his life, body, and mind apart.

**Author's Note:**

> Once again *this work had been fully written out and I will be posting chapters as I edit them.* Thank you so much for reading and I hope you have a wonderful day!


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